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Friday, January 25, 2013

Obamapalooza 2013

My, what a disgraceful inauguration that was. Everything about it disgusted me: the way President Obama tried to superimpose it upon the celebration of Martin Luther King's birthday, the hyperpartisan inaugural speech he gave (and the insipid inaugural poem that accompanied it), the awful-looking Romulan outfit that Michelle Obama was wearing, and her utter classlessness as John Boehner tried to make polite conversation. So now we have to suffer through an orgy of media sycophants falling all over themselves to wash Obama's feet and anoint him with oil, and to remind us all for the trillionth time how profoundly historic he is... brace yourself for four more years of failure, and four more years of him (and these same sycophants) blaming Bush for that failure.

Sure, Obama is historic. He's the first black president--if you don't count Bill Clinton--but so what? He's also got the thinnest resume of any president in our nation's history, and probably the thinnest skin. In only one term he's already added more to the national debt than any of his predecessors. And, as I like to joke, it turns out the first president to eat a dog will be the last to eat a Twinkie. Not everything you could call historic is inherently good. If Obama ate a baby on live television, that would be pretty historic too.

These days, I find myself thinking a lot about another historic president. Calvin Coolidge was the first president to have his inauguration broadcast on the radio, and the first to have his State of the Union address broadcast on the radio... he was also the first president to appear in a sound film:

Calvin Coolidge left office with a budget that was smaller than than the one he inherited... how many presidents managed to do that?